Blog

We have several clients this season who, having seen great results with a website we built and managed for them, have come back to us for another website. It’s hard to think of a nicer compliment. One of these clients said, “Let’s talk about blogging. We really didn’t do that with the first website.”

Actually, we did. The number of unique visitors to that website has grown more than 12,000% in two years, and you don’t get that without blogging.

But our three posts a week — plus unscheduled posts by their in-house team — are presented as articles. We built the site with the blog post categories as the main navigation through the website, and the word “blog” doesn’t appear anywhere on the website.

It doesn’t have to. You can get the benefits of blogging, which include increased authority, growing traffic, and increased value to your visitors, without calling your blog a blog.

Sometimes, as with the client I mentioned above, you want to use your blog posts in different ways and send them to different places. The insurance site below pulls most blog posts to the “Articles” page, but also uses posts on other pages for other purposes. No single page is the only place to read new content.

For other sites, the blog is a blog, but the name “Blog” doesn’t convey the feeling they want. The image at the top of this post is from outdoor supplier Uncle Sam’s, where the blog is called “What’s New?” and is both in the main navigation and pulled to the front page. We’ve used plenty of other descriptive names for blogs, including “In the Know.

We often use “News,” especially when clients plan to do their own blogging and don’t want to be pinned down to a regular schedule.

It’s simple to use blogging technology, but give your blog section a name that suits your organization, your planned use of the blog, and your resources.